The Goshawk

Author: T. H. White

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 35.00 AUD
  • : 9781474601665
  • : Orion Publishing Group, Limited
  • : Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  • :
  • : 0.294
  • : September 2015
  • : 207mm X 138mm X 22mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 35.0
  • : December 2015
  • :
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
Barcode 9781474601665
9781474601665

Description

The predecessor to Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, T. H. White's nature writing classic, The Goshawk, asks the age-old question: what is it that binds human beings to other animals? White, the author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham's Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentence--"the bird reverted to a feral state"--seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, "A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word 'feral' has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, 'ferocious' and 'free.'" Immediately, White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and, though he did not know it, long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication, of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love.

White kept a daybook describing his volatile relationship with Gos--at once a tale of obsession, a comedy of errors, and a hymn to the hawk. It was this that became The Goshawk, one of modern literature's most memorable and surprising encounters with the wilderness--as it exists both within us and without.

Author description

T. H. White (1906-1964) was born in Bombay, India, and educated at Queen's College, Cambridge. He was the author of twenty-six published books, but he is perhaps best known for his sequence of novels reimagining the Arthurian legend, referred to collectively as THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, the fantasy MISTRESS MASHAM'S RESPONSE and THE GOSHAWK. He died at sea on his way home from a lecture tour and is buried in Piraeus, Greece.